"In environmental terms this century belongs to China," Bill McKibben's review of my book in Orion #climate #eg

I read this beautifully reported book just after finishing a short piece of my own on the subject, one equally equivocal but much less fully reported. It’s a tribute to China’s opaqueness that even a trip like the one Watts makes, which takes him to every corner of the country, isn’t enough to really reach a conclusion. On the one hand, the People’s Republic is burning truly awesome quantities of coal—the equivalent of Britain’s entire electric grid is added each year to China’s power network. Watts recounts the standard story of days when the sun never manages to break through the gloomy haze (and the heartbreaking story of having to hide with the dead coal miners’ widows that he’d interviewed so the security police wouldn’t arrest them for telling the truth). But he also talks to the entrepreneurs and innovators bringing renewable energy to China faster than any place on...